“How are your tiling skills?” she said with a cheeky grin. “I’ve got that new vanity to put in the guest bathroom and tiles to set.”
“Well, we’ve set more than a few tiles ourselves,” he said. “So why not? Have you got them?”
She nodded with a big grin and said, “Come on. I’ll show you.” And she raced up the stairs ahead of him.
“This is the Laysha who I remember,” he murmured to himself, as he followed her, taking a big sip of coffee so he didn’t spill it as he went. He hadn’t told her how much he loved this farmhouse, but it was to die for. It was massive. It was old. The heating needed some work. But thankfully they were in Texas, so it’s not like it was as bad as if they lived farther north. The fact that she had five acres here made it a deal as far as he was concerned. She bought it before he even knew about it.
When she told him what she had done, he wholeheartedly approved and was half jealous that he hadn’t found it first. He might have moved back home if he had a place like this to come to. As it was, she had helped him on a bunch of renovations that he had been doing on his brother’s house years ago, plus on his own house at the time—which he then sold during the divorce—so it was only fair that he helped her on a few of hers.
As he walked into the upstairs guest bathroom, he whistled. “Wow,” he said, “you’re really taking this old girl and moving her into the new century.”
“Just because she’s old,” Laysha said, “doesn’t mean she doesn’t deserve the best.”
A beautiful bathtub, a big clawfoot, modernized with stand-up plumbing on the outside of it, sat in front of a huge window that overlooked her acreage. The floor underneath had been tiled right up to where the bathtub rested, but the remainder of the tiling hadn’t been done, and a walk-in shower was off on one side, built into a small section, all the tiling completed in there—loved that, complete with the great big rain showerhead. He noted the vanity sitting here but not installed. “You’ve done a lot of this work,” he said, “and it looks fantastic.”
“Well, it was really selfish of me,” she said, “but I did the en suite first. So now this guest bath needs the vanity set and the tiling done,” she added, “and then it’s pretty good to go.”
“Show me the en suite.” As he headed across the hallway, he realized that the master took half the upstairs, and the other half comprised the two smaller guest bedrooms sharing that guest bathroom. As he walked into her bedroom, he whistled. “I forgot how big this was.”
It had a big arched ceiling and huge semicircle windows on both sides. And she had a massive queen bed in the center, piled high with bedding. It looked so damn inviting that he had to stop and stare for a moment.
“Problems?” she asked from the corner. He turned, looked at her, motioned to the bed, and said, “Damn, that looks good.”
“I didn’t even remake it this morning,” she confessed. “Normally I do. I just tossed the covers today though.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve been traveling for a little bit too long,” he said, “and that looks pretty damn fine to me.” He walked over to the open en suite bath and stared. “Wow.” A huge walk-in shower, with three sets of jets and a bench seat, sat next to a big bathtub, very similar to the other clawfoot tub, only a step higher. Plus, all the tiling been done halfway up on the walls all the way around. “Damn, you do good work.”
“It took a lot of man-hours,” she said. “I only finished it about two months ago.”
“There’s no only about it.” As he turned, he looked and said, “Hardwood floors, right?”
“Yes. I stripped and refinished them before I moved in the bed,” she said. “I stayed in the spare room until I had it done.”
“Is this room done then?”
“It is,” she said. “These windows are already doubled. They were cracked when I bought the place, so I had to replace them. Those are all new. And I haven’t done anything about upgrading the insulation in the roof yet,” she said, “but I might.”
“Where’s the attic, and is it something you can do yourself, or will you need to spray it in?”
“The attic is just a cutaway access hole right now, but spray in would be easier for insulating it,” she said. With that, they headed back downstairs, going room by room, as he noted things that needed to be done and things that they could do without. As he stepped into the original kitchen, he said, “You’re such a cook that I figured you’d have redone the kitchen first.”
“I wanted to live in it and to figure out what I wanted first,” she said. “And I was pretty stressed after the divorce, so I wanted my bedroom done to give me that sanctuary to go to when life got to be too much.”
“How’s work?”
“It’s okay,” she said. She was a paralegal, and her days at work were the complete opposite of what she did at home. “It’s just always so stressful with all the court-mandated deadlines and the fear of making a single typo that can undo a whole contract.”
“It’s that type of job, isn’t it?”
“It is. The lawyers make the big money, and we do all the grunt work,” she said with a laugh. “I should have finished law school.”
“You should have,” he said.
She rolled her eyes at him. “No more of that I-told-you-so stuff, please.”
“Nah,” he said, “besides, you already know. I told you so.”
She laughed at that. “Right,” she said, “that was your one and only freebie.”
He grinned, refilled his coffee, and stepped back out on the porch. “Damn, I love this place.”
“Me too,” she said. She walked up, poked her arm through his elbow, and said, “I’m glad you’re here for a few days.”
“Maybe a little longer,” he said, “but, if I’m an inconvenience, I can go to a hotel.”
She stared at him in shock. “No way,” she said. “Besides, I need help here.”
He laughed. “From what I can see, you’re doing just fine on your own.”
“It’s so strange,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s one of those fun things that we did together that I don’t know when it ever became something more than a hobby.”
“That’s because we like to do things with our hands.”
“You got me into that,” she said in a teasing manner. “How many hours did I spend in the workshop with you?”
“We built some pretty crazy things,” he said, grinning. “Yep, we sure did.” Just then his phone rang.
She dropped her hand and stepped away so he could pull out his phone.
He frowned as he answered it and said, “Hey, Badger. I’m here.”
“Good,” Badger said. “Just checking in that you arrived safe and sound.”
“Yep, I’m here safe and sound,” he said. “Haven’t had a chance to check out where the dog went missing from yet though.”
“That’s fine,” he said. “The owners apparently moved.”